Posts tagged “analog”

ChittahChattah Quickies

Analog Infoviz: Handmade Visualization Toolkit [brainpickings.org] – Columbian designer Jose Duarte creates fresh DIY lo-fi information visualizations, expressed “in the wild,” using a basic toolkit. What do you think – how does this treatment affect the data, versus a standard pie-chart or a slick design-pornish infographic (IMHO, a trend verging on the overbearing. This was reinforced when the trend spawned the term infauxgraphic to describe cases where the visual treatment takes primacy over the accuracy of the information.)?

Using ordinary materials like chalk, string, stickers and balloons, you can experiment with various visualization techniques, from area charts to bubble graphs to – yes, you guessed it – Venn diagrams. Using the kit, he made these lovely lo-fi visualizations of data from the 2010 State of the Internet report, revealing, among other things, that Lady Gaga is bigger on Twitter than Obama and the majority of the world’s email volume is spam.

Above is just one example – the article has plenty of others…and an offer for a free Handmade Visualization Toolkit of your own!

Core77 Wiretap: Portigal Consulting talk about the Analog Human and The Digital Machine

Check out Core77 Wiretap: Portigal Consulting talk about the Analog Human and The Digital Machine. Here’s a teaser

Wonder what the conversation is like at someone else’s shop? Ever wanted to go backstage at a design firm? We asked Steve Portigal, Julie Norvaisas, and Dan Soltzberg of Portigal Consulting to sit down and share what they’re talking about. Here’s their open mike/chin-wag/theory slam.

Dan: I envisioned sitting down here to have this conversation and trying to figure out what we’re really talking about. So I pulled this statement out of some notes Steve wrote the other day: “The Analog Human; The Digital Machine.” I thought that was really provocative, so I wanted to start by asking you to say a little more about this idea?

Steve: I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this conceit that we can take humans-you know, messy, irrational, organic-and somehow cut them open and figure out the binary, rational, predictable, money-making algorithms that determine what they do. You see all this harnessing of science, you know, whether it’s neuro-this or lie detector-that or psychotherapy-this that gets used in the service of, not helping people, but helping marketers crack the nut of what people want, where is the desire center in the brain. You know, that we can learn things about people in a way that is “true”-that is predictable and true, and will determine consumption patterns. I find the idea that we should be able to do that just fascinating, because that’s not the world of people that we live in as people, so why as marketers or designers or producers do we think that we should turn people into things that they really aren’t?

Julie: There’s another aspect of that that I find really fascinating too: that you’re just talking about it in this dichotomy like there’s “us,” and then there’s “people.” Well, we’re people, right? We’re people trying to understand people and trying to create these scientific methods of doing it is just-I think you’re absolutely right-a conceit, and we often kind of remove ourselves from the situation. And I think empathy is a much more powerful tool than science in that case.

Meanwhile, here’s a few links we’ve come across in the past few days that pick up on some of the themes we explore in our dialog.

The Conversation, and The Technology

The Conversation is a fantastic 1974 Coppola film that has surveillance as one of its central themes. There’s a lot of great technology imagery, especially the analog audio that Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) uses to decipher the content of the conversation, and also the surveillance trade show that Caul attends. Here’s a sampling of stills depicting the awesomeness:

The lab, with lots of reel-to-reel and plenty of buttons for Bill DeRouchey.
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The trade show, complete with booth babe, and some very 1970s design (environments, hardware, clothing, typography).
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Series

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